


After Death

by riddleinacapitalm



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Memorials, Minor Character Death, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 18:46:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2743223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riddleinacapitalm/pseuds/riddleinacapitalm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max knows how to kill and how to run. She knows to only carry the living when you're in the field, because getting caught carrying someone that isn't them anymore is just phony sentimentality.<br/>But this time it's not a casualty in the field. It is a person, one of their own, and she knows that she cannot run from this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Death

Max knew what happened when you died. She knew the rates of decomposition in order to tell how long a body had been cold. She knew death intimately, was surrounded by it, didn't even blink so long as she didn't know their name. But she never knew what happened to bodies after they died. Past the morgue, she knew distantly that there were options, but that was for people without barcodes on the back of their neck. All she knew was that people with barcodes disappeared when they were killed.

Everyone she had lost in life, she had lost in the field. In the field, you didn't stick around to accompany the bodies to their final resting place, you run so the same thing doesn't to you. You carry only the living, sometimes not even then.

But she needed to know what happened with Biggs.

Biggs, strung up in front of the X that she had seen on fire so many times outside TC, the X that she had destroyed in passing so many time, just on principle, and they had the  _nerve--_

Biggs couldn't be left with these monsters. Biggs was not theirs to keep, they didn't have the right, he was his own and he belonged with his own so they had to keep their sick and twisted hands off of him before she twisted them off herself.

Alec tugged her arm, the more rational of the two for once, and pulled her back before she could start weaving through the crowd. She doesn't know if she's grateful or not for his interference.

* * *

* * *

When the girl is discovered, she has been dead at the most 16 hours.

A scouting party was in the area before, trying to find buildings they could make livable, and had come back with Max and Alec and Dix so they could start planning what to do with the space.

She is small, too small, but she has Brin's face. It is hard to tell, but from the size of her frame Max determines that she is an X6. A withered and aged Brin, a victim of late-stage progeria. Max curses. They had supplies, very few supplies, but there were X5's that set up a medical facility only a mile away and they knew all of the ways transgenics were made wrong. They could've helped.

Max bundles the small girl in her arms and thinks that she is too easy to carry. Max wonders if she's real at all. Why was she all the way over here? Why didn't she come to them for help?

Max curses and Alec looks at her with a helpless look as they both realize there is nowhere to bring her.

They have no place to bury their dead.

Only the rich had the luxury of buying plots of land for their dead bodies. Terminal City was a place of death to humans, but for transgenics it was supposed to be the only place where death could not touch them. They had not planned for this.

She holds the girl closer to her and Alec averts his gaze.

They decide that the incinerator is the best choice. They have only used it on scraps of unsalvageable material, but it was bigger than the ones in morgues. Something like a viking funeral seems fitting somehow, and the only fresh ground they have is promised to the transgenics with a green thumb. They don't know if anything will grow on the poisoned ground, but they hope anyway.

No one knows why was in the outskirts of TC. A few X6 recognize her from Manticore, but none of them had seen her since the fire. She must have come here in her last days, but didn't make it to anyone in time to get help.

Max finds a way to make it her fault and Alec snaps at her self-loathing. They quietly promise to fight later, after all of this is over.

None of them act surprised at the crowd that gathers around as they say their goodbyes to the girl, although Max is a little confused as to how so many people found out so quickly. No one knows if she had a name, so they say goodbye to her using her designation and Joshua pulls her into him as she turns away from the wave of heat that hits her face.

* * *

Joshua paints on the wall where the girl was found, and Alec compares it to Monet and a few other impressionist painters, and Max says it's some of his best work to date. It is a landscape that is unfamiliar to Seattle, with brightly lit skies and fields of color. It is a sharp contrast to the gray that they are surrounded by, and despite the distance Max and a few others find reasons to visit.

When she has time off, she chalks it up to sleep deprivation when she decides to devote her time to gathering rocks and tools around the city that can be used as chisels. She finds about two dozen good palm-sized rocks before she settles in front of the mural. With a rock placed in front of her, a chisel in her left hand and a mallet in her right, she sets to work.

_Tink. Tink. Tink._

Soon the girl's designation is carved into the rock and she settles in front of the mural. It's not enough and she takes out another rock. This one is Jack, the first brother she lost to the shakes and to Manticore, and after a second of hesitation she adds his designation underneath.

She doesn't know how much time has passed when Alec sits down next to her and plucks a blank rock from her pile. She doesn't take her eyes off of the rocks she has set in front of the mural as she hands him her tools.

Eva. Seth. Ben. Tinga. Brain.

_Tink. Tink. Tink._

Rachel. Biggs. Cece. Three more with designations that are unfamiliar to Max.

After that, she can't visit the mural at eye level, and finds a high place where she can see the whole thing at a distance. The rock piles up without her or Alec adding to it, growing with names and designations of people that she does not know.

Sometimes her tunnel vision kicks in and she can only see the names, too many names but still probably not enough. She didn't know how many they really lost, these are only the ones that are remembered. She gets angry and sad and allows herself to cry because it wasn't fair. They didn't ask to be born, but no one does, and the world had no right to try and take that from them after they were done using them for their selfish gain.

Sometimes she only sees Joshua's mural. She wonders if Joshua has ever seen anything like the field that he painted, or if he saw something similar in one of father's books. She makes plans for when they are free to live in the open, because on the days when she only sees Joshua's mural she can't picture a future where they don't have their freedom. She plans on taking Joshua through California, zigzagging through the state through all the scenic routes, because they won't be running they'll be traveling. She will take him to the beaches and the farms and all of the flower fields they see, and she thinks that Joshua will probably sneeze on everything, because his sensitive nose is probably unused to the pollen that dry weather blows around.

Sometimes Alec joins her. Sometimes they don't need words and just sit, shoulders pressed together, and they're off in their own worlds. Sometimes they bring the other into their worlds, shoulders still pressed together, and tell each other about the ones that they've lost. Sometimes they talk about the future, not the immediate future but the faraway future that they want.

Max brings up taking Joshua to California and he starts throwing ideas at her. He tells her about which museums he'd think Joshua would like, gardens that are like zoos for plants, all the orchards that he wanted to sneak through after he admits that he's never had a peach before. He says that the tallest building in California is in LA at over 1000 and if she's nice he'll take her there, and Max doesn't mention how LA is filled with bad memories of her pre-Pulse days because she's convinced that scaling a building with her two favorite transgenics would fill LA with only good memories.

Sometimes she looks at the entirety of the scene before her. The murals, the rocks, the rundown buildings and all of the people that are walking around through the hazardous waste and she is proud of their strength. They have made a home out of a hostile environment, and no matter what the world throws at them they will continue to do so. They are strong. Not invincible, the rocks are proof of that, but the mural is proof that they will find peace one day.

Sometimes she wonders who will write her name when she goes.

 


End file.
